Decius wrote:
I don't really agree with the left's campaign against the concept of corporate personhood.

So government contractors don't have a right to privacy but corporations do?

In the hearing (and, by extension, the Slate article), the AT&T lawyer raises your point on raiding nonprofit offices. The justices point out that the law is already rife with corporate protections, and qualifying a corporation as a person crosses a philosophical boundary to which I'm inclined to agree.

Ginsburg observes that "overwhelmingly, personal is used to describe an individual, not an artificial being," and so Klineberg offers up another scenario in which corporate privacy could be violated by a narrow reading of "personal privacy." Imagine, he says, a FOIA request seeking "internal documents within, say, an environmental nonprofit organization talking about their political strategies."

Justice Stephen Breyer asks whether Klineberg has any examples of this ever happening in the past 35 years. When Klineberg can't think of one, Breyer suggests that "[m]aybe one reason this has really never been a problem is because all … these organizations that have interests in privacy are actually taken care of by the other 17 exemptions here." And Scalia adds for good measure: "Another reason might [be] that nobody ever thought that personal privacy would cover this."

-janelane, not a lawyer and admitted telecomm hater

RE: FCC v. AT&T reveals the limits of corporate personhood at the Supreme Court. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine